Need a fix? Ask the government for money

A hundred thousand people are being paid incapacity benefit every week because they are alcoholics or drug addicts, it emerged yesterday.

The number of people claiming that they cannot work and receiving the benefit as a result of drug abuse and alcoholism has doubled in nine years.

Claimants are paid up to £78.50 a week, around £20 more than they would get on Jobseekers' Allowance.

Ministers faced criticism after admitting that 48,960 people were on incapacity benefit and severe disablement allowance because the "primary diagnosis" was that they were alcoholics. In 1997 the figure was 27,100.

A further 48,530 claimants receive the weekly payments because their primary diagnosis is judged to be drug abuse.

Nine years ago the figure was 21,900.

So since Labour has come to power they have squandered millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on allowing drug addicts to buy more dope and alcoholics to buy more booze. Seriously what do you think they are going to do with that extra £20 per week?

Why should we even be paying these people to sit on their arses and inject themselves with drugs and drink themselves to death?

How much have we lost? I know 100,000 weren’t put on it straightaway (actually I wouldn’t put it passed Labour to do something like that). Let us take a guess that over the last 9 years an average of 70,000 alcoholics and drug addicts were on benefits. We can say we have lost more than £49 million. I am sure Labour could have kept some hospitals open with that or paid to have a few brand new helicopters built for our troops.

I really don’t know what else to say about this story. How can Labour waste so much money? I know they are stupid and incompetent but even this is bad for them. Maybe they were trying to fudge the unemployment figures?